Paper short abstract:

A digital ethnography of workplace wellbeing at a London tech startup during the COVID-19 pandemic. It finds that workers understand wellbeing through the notion of productivity, which is actively cultivated through the successful management of the boundaries between work and nonwork social roles.

Paper long abstract:

During the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown, the spatial and social structure of work was radically reconfigured by the switch to work-from-home policies and technologically-mediated work. Utilizing this point of transformation to working practices as a site to generate rich insights into the relationship between work and wellbeing, I examine how workers in a London tech startup cultivated a sense of wellbeing whilst working from home.

I found that workers associated wellbeing at work with the presence (or lack) of a balanced and self-determined work-life rhythm (Rapport 2008), understood via the language of productivity and fatigue. Using data collected through digital ethnographic methods during the COVID-19 pandemic, I explore how workers actively managed the boundaries between their work and non-work identities in temporal, spatial, and social ways (Ollier-Malaterre, Jacobs, and Rothbard 2019). In the absence of previously used boundary management techniques, such as the daily commute, and in the presence of increased digitally-mediated communication and restricted movement, workers utilized technology and space in novel ways to cultivate a sense of holistic balance. I suggest that the workers’ experience and perception of wellbeing speaks to broader socioeconomic trends that idealize flexibility in workers and corporations. However, depending on the social position of the worker, this flexibility could be experienced either as freedom, or as precarity.

This research highlights the analytical value of wellbeing for anthropology. In understanding socially-defined states of wellbeing, we gain an insight into the orientation behind everyday action, and the social, economic, and political contexts that frame it.